Stanley Kramer’s funny, provocative, and poignant Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner from 1967 has been a hole in my viewing history for far too long. With the arrival of Sony’s release of Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection Volume 4, I was able to remedy that, and I was finally able to settle in and enjoy this classic, iconic, and relevant film.

With a brilliant cast led by three Oscar winners, Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, the story follows Joanna Drayton (Katharine Houghton, Hepburn’s real-life niece) as she comes home from a trip to Hawai’i where she met and fell in love with John Wade Prentice (Poitier), and she’s bringing him home, briefly to visit her parents before he goes on to Geneva for a few months. They want to get married, and Joey believes that there will be no issues as her parents, Matt (Tracy) and Christina (Hepburn) have been lifelong liberally-minded people.

So there should be no problem if Prentice is a black man.

Things are complicated by the arrival of John’s parents played by Roy Glenn and Beah Richards, exacerbated by the Drayton’s housekeeper, Tillie (Isabel Sanford) and possibly smoothed over by a man of god, Monsignor Ryan (Cecil Kellaway).

The film garnered eleven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, but only walked away with two, Best Actress for Hepburn and Best Original Screenplay, but everyone delivers a top-tier performance, and you can see that Poitier’s character is aware of how the world sees him, what it expects of him, and he consistently raises himself above it, a struggle no one should ever face.

My only issue was not their skin colour, but the fact that Prentice is fourteen years older than twenty-three-year-old Joanna, but that may just be my own personal thing.

A powerful, and informative take on race relations, reflecting the times and the attitudes, the film is frequently funny, incredibly poignant, and remains a fabulous watch about the power of love. The final scene is made all the more powerful when you realize that Tracy passed two weeks later.

With the 4K upgrade, scanned from the film’s negative, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner looks like it could have been shot yesterday, The image is sharp and the technicolour is full and beautiful, the scenes on the Drayton’s patio, obviously a set, look stunning against the San Francisco backdrop.

The 4K disc comes with the film’s theatrical teaser, as well as a commentary by film historians, Eddy Friedfeld, Lee Pfieffer and Paul Scarbo, the accompanying Blu-ray disc also comes fully loaded with extras including, the film’s theatrical trailer, a photo gallery, introductions by Steven Spielberg, Quincy Jones, Tom Brokaw, and Karen Kramer. There’s a short doc on Kramer and his films, his acceptance of the Irving Thalberg Award, Al Gore receiving the Stanley Kramer Award, and an engaging two-part documentary about the making of the film, A Love Story and A Special Kind of Love.

I’ve filled this missing hole in my cinematic education and was absolutely delighted by what I discovered. This is a gorgeous film with powerhouse and nuanced performances and it’s all revealed beautifully in gorgeous 4K.

Check it out in the Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection Volume 4, available now.